software

Because I often ask myself “What is the signature of the artist when compared to the gesture of the machine?”, I returned to the compound sine waves I explored years ago as “harmonographs”, this time to further interrogate the question of “line” and “hand” under the rubric of pseudo writing. 

In asemic writing, the style and gesture of writing becomes divorced from meaning. Examples are found in the modernist works of Cy Twombly and Henri Michaux, or in the more contemporary work of Mirtha Dermisache. 

In Motherwell's  "Elegies to the Spanish Republic," abstractions of bull testicals serve as symbolic links with heroic death in the bloodly tragic war with fascism. He ties the Spanish bullfighting culture—a spectacle of life and death embeded within the everyday—to the contemplation of a specific historical loss.

This software uses flocking algorithms as the basis for the composition of soundscapes. It is a meditation on the question of what the group is, and what its proper functioning is. If we seem to constantly be wondering if we are doing what we are supposed to be doing in a group, birds by contrast, know how to flock.

Forty years seperate the events captured in these images, one from May 1968 Paris and the other from November 2011 New York. The pixels from each have been rearranged to approximate the image of the other.

To say that under a regime of the digital, the photograph has become "dubious," as Peter Lunenfeld has, still does not account fully for the ontological change that photography has undergone. The gross manipulability of the photograph is actually that which is most clearly understood and commonly remarked on.

In this experiment I fed back images into the system which created them so that the subsequent image degraded in each instantiation.

This fade to black approximates the effects of massified circulation of images where it seems that over time the images which once shocked, after repeated exposure, seem hardly able to elicit any response at all.

Images produced through the algorithmic processing of the images of Abu Ghraib. It seems that we are in some way blind to them. And this processing, which is likewise blind, repeats a kind of failed accounting for what the images show. We have failed to see, failed to reckon with, and failed to become accountable for that which the images bear witness to.

I continue to question the ethics of representing atrocity and the ironic dissipation of the moral force of images of atrocity within the society of the spectacle.

In Precarious Life, Judith Butler writes, "The reality is not conveyed by what is represented within the image, but through the challenge to representation that reality delivers." As I set up my drawing machine to reproduce the images from Abu Ghraib, I had that problem in mind.

In these plotter drawings two systems of representation are contrasted: mimesis, wherein the form of the representation is derived through a process of imitation; and synthesis, wherein the form is derived by a process of virtual ontogenesis -- that is the form is made in a way analogous to the process of growth in the referent.

The constraints of drawing with an antiquated plotter include the difficulty of drawing anything but straight lines. So to represent photographic images took some creativity. This software draws random lines in a density inversely proportionate to the light density of each area in the photograph.

The multiplication of trees, a forest makes.

The first drawing algorithm I tried, after writing a java driver for my HP7475 plotter, was a recursive tree algorithm. These simple figures based on repeated uniform bifurcations produce almost perfect fractal structures. They are varied by changing the ratio of the left and right branches, the thickness of subsequent branches, etc.

Animal painting is popular again; the evidence is on YouTube. But it was popular in the Fifties and Sixties too and taken seriously by some in the art world and certainly by some biologists. Congo, the painting chimpanzee was a star.

Experiments with the children's programming language "logo" resulted in these allegorical programs where the turtle (the drawing agent in logo) takes an anxious journey.

Taking off from the children's song, "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall," this piece creates allegorical software in which the path of drawing turtle of logo progressively gets more wobbly.

The question of what it is possible to think under the current regime of the United States, and what it might be possible to think sheltered from the threat of government surveillance is the journal's main concern. The Journal of American Thought Crime distributes a literary magazine in the form of an encrypted mailing list.